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Their whole website looks like a bad joke, are you sure that's actually real?

After knee surgery due to a skiing accident in Zermatt, Switzerland, I was told to stay in bed and not move much for a week. I was handed a men’s portable urinal which did indeed limit my trips to and from the bathroom. It was a green, plastic, ugly piece of equipment. Soon after I began to walk , I realized that I had developed a lazy habit. I started using the green, plastic urinal again. My girlfriend was furious and said that the urinal wasn’t acceptable in the bedroom. That was the moment when I decided that there had to be something better than this. A product with a positive design approach. Maybe even with a touch of sex appeal if that could ever happen!”

It surfaced that the mother of the jar's creator, and the woman who is the legal owner of the company, is a member of the Nicosia Municipal Board, and former Vice-Mayor with the ruling conservative party DISY.Kinda explains why this could get EU funding without anyone objecting to it in the first place.

This might not be the thread for it, but afaik we do not have a rape culture thread. Some disturbing details about sexual abuse follow.

Last week a young woman (19yo iirc) was murdered in the Greek island of Rhodes/Rodos. The suspects under investigation are two young men, a 19 year old Albanian Greek and a 21 year old Hellenic Greek (ethnicity will become relevant). The motive has been established as the 19 year old trying to make the woman agree to a threesome with the 21 year old, and her refusing. I think it's still unclear if the men proceeded to rape her, but the woman was beaten up by either one or both men, and the final act of this abuse was to tie her up while she was alive and throw her down a cliff into the sea, which was what killed her. The two suspects are trying to blame each other and to support they only because accomplices to the murder because the other threatened to kill them if they didn't cooperate.Former partners of both men came forward as witnesses and they spoke of very abusive men who would force them into sex, would often "share their girls" between them, and so on.

That was horrendous as it was. Both men were detained pending trial. Greek media of course largely focused on the 19 year old Albanian Greek, which has always been a 'criminalised' ethnicity in Greece (and there also recent political tensions with Albania). This led also to some victim-blaming comments by local New Democracy (mainstream lib-con party) politicians along the lines of "tragic incident but what do you expect if you go to bed with illegals?" (vomit-inducing comments regardless, but also a racist distraction, given that both suspects are Greek citizens, and one of them is ethnically Hellenic too).

And here comes the second sexual abuse of this story. The 19 year old, who was detained in isolation pending trial, was somehow extracted from his locked cell by at least 7 other inmates, beaten up, and raped multiple times. That means that prison wardens were either complicit, or completely unable to control the situation.SKAI TV, a 'rational' and prestige TV channel representing the political leadership of the New Democracy party (so neoliberalism), somehow got hold one of the inmates who participated, and the interview with him was a complete description of rape culture. Not only he explained how being raped was the least he deserved (for his moral crime of killing a woman), but he should also be paraded in prison dressed in woman's clothes, and prostituted at the red light district of Athens. To his "credit", the inmate interviewed said that now they should bring them the Hellenic Greek suspect too, to give him the same treatment. The transcript of that interview I read in the papers was sickening. The prisoner thought of himself as a folk hero more or less, and associated everything feminine with weakness and undesirability.

It's common everywhere I think, to expect that rapists, and especially child rapists will get this treatment in prison (even in detention before trial, apparently). People celebrate prison rapes because they think it's justice served. Of course, in reality, even if you consider it 'vigilante justice', it's very class based. Rich people who go in for sexual crimes including abuse of children, have a very comfy life in prison and often are leaders of prison rape gangs, or often, in hospital rooms because of some vaguely defined illness they get mid-trial. And rapes in prison, contrary to what the 'outside world' thinks, are not based on any moral code. In Cyprus around 2013 we had a string of prison rapes that led to suicides of the victims, who where in for drug use or petty theft. But they were often of a migratory background and very young (17-21 years old - we do not have separate facilities for underage criminals in Cyprus, although in practice 14~16 year olds might be forcibly institutionalised ).

And for those prison rapists, what good have they done to the woman whose "no" was not respected and which led to her being murdered? The rape of the suspect played out with exactly the same rules.

It's sickening all around, this story. For a long time I began thinking of imprisonment as a failing of the society. We do it because as a society we have failed to come up with a better solution yet. But allowing, tolerating, or celebrating prison rapes goes beyond just admitting that our justice system is inadequate. Those rapes are preventable.

Prison rape being so widespread even in developed nations is one of the most fucked-up things about the world. Of course the high prevalence of rape in general is, but among issues that happen to disproportionately affect men, it's up there.

Being in prison is the punishment. Being raped in prison is state-facilitated abuse.

Not only he explained how being raped was the least he deserved (for his moral crime of killing a woman), but he should also be paraded in prison dressed in woman's clothes, and prostituted at the red light district of Athens.

md0 wrote:It's common everywhere I think, to expect that rapists, and especially child rapists will get this treatment in prison (even in detention before trial, apparently). People celebrate prison rapes because they think it's justice served.

For me the really fucked-up aspect of this is that it's true even of "good liberals" who are otherwise staunchly anti-rape. Just recently I witnessed an acquaintance express qualms about sharing memes about Trump associates being assaulted in prison, employing the rationalisation "I don't really think about them as rape jokes". Regardless whether you think of rape as the "point" of the joke, it still normalises a status quo where rape is considered an acceptable punishment.

"Richmond is a real scholar; Owen just learns languages because he can't bear not to know what other people are saying."--Margaret Lattimore on her two sons

Continuing on the Greek case...I think we can describe what's going on here Jesuswashing. The Hellenic murder suspect is getting a very interesting treatment from a chunk of the media (including mainstream sources): Between the murder and now, he found Jesus and has become a totally different person, very pious but also on the verge of a mental breakdown. The Albanian suspect remains "unremorseful", "not convincing", and "clearly aware of being guilty", to use some of the descriptions used by the media.https://www.kar.org.gr/2018/12/14/epicheirisi-xeplyma/

So much for justice for the victim and her family. If your murderer is Hellenic, it was probably your fault

I didn't realise that not only was there a sculpture made of the famous kiss in Times Square following the end of WWII but that there are versions of it mounted around the world. A few days ago, George Mendonsa, the sailor featured in it, died. The next day, someone spraypainted "#metoo" on the original sculpture in Sarasota, FL. I posted about this today and found out that quite a few friends did not realise that Greta Zimmer Friedman, the woman pictured (a dental assistant and not a nurse, as many have assumed) clearly stated in a 2005 interview that she did not consent to the kiss, that it was forced upon her against her will and, hence, was an act of sexual assault.

The real kicker is that the sculpture is titled "Unconditional Surrender". I get the heebie-jeebies just thinking about that.

"Richmond is a real scholar; Owen just learns languages because he can't bear not to know what other people are saying."--Margaret Lattimore on her two sons

I thought this would be an interesting addition to the discussion of sex-linked toxic behaviours.

It seems like women as sexual harassers are only relatively common in education, possibly because that's a professional field were a lot of women work in and have positions of authority. I think there's something into that correlation, and it's probably a more tenable link than just reducing it to biology.

What I would be interested in is a study on the attitudes of men and women against male victims of sexual abuse by female victimisers.